The Flopping of The Bonfire of the Vanities: Thoughts

Helmed by the versatile and accomplished filmmaker Brian De Palma fresh off his hit The Untouchables, with Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith and Bruce Willis as the leads in a moment in which their own careers were also going very well (1988 an annus mirabilis for all of them, the already "bankable" Hanks nominated for his first Oscar for Big, and Griffith nominated too for her career-high turn in Working Girl, while Willis became an indisputable A-lister with Die Hard), and backed by a then-robust $29 million budget ($70 million in today's Consumer Price Index-adjusted dollars, for an adult drama), everyone involved in the big-screen adaptation of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities had a lot invested in the film--and then saw that investment turn out disastrously. Like many an enthusiastically made and lavishly backed adaptation of a Big Book Warner Brothers' The Bonfire of the Vanities was a colossal critical and financial disappointment at the time, the film making just $15 million at the American box office, and never added much to that figure abroad or after, as seen in how one is unable to claim even a "cult" following for it. (Thus do its Rotten Tomatoes critics' and audience scores stand at 15 and 26 percent, respectively.)

In explaining the disaster, a big enough scandal at the time to enable a piece of gossip about it to become a bestseller (Julia Salamon's The Devil's Candy) it is common to criticize lapses in artistic vision and the meddling of studio executives. However, the stress on these overlooks the elephant in the room, namely the source material for the film. In fact it does not seem unimaginable that the movie came off as a shallow, flimsy thing because the book was a shallow, flimsy thing--certainly next to the way in which it had been talked up. It does not seem unimaginable that the movie was, in the view of its detractors, "cartoonish," because the book was cartoonish.

Of course, hearing such charges people of conventional mind will be skeptical. After all, The Bonfire of the Vanities is supposed to be a Great American Novel, almost universally acclaimed, such that people in positions of great responsibility thought the (supposedly) Great American Novel had a chance of being a Great American Movie and put their money where their mouths were. However, consider the book itself--and the extent to which people actually read it. It is, after all, 659 pages long in the hardback edition. How many people actually read that all the way to the end--as against the many who said they did because Wolfe's book came to be something that douchebags gabbed about at cocktail parties? How many of those who actually did read the words really processed them in that way that really deserves to be called "reading," picturing what the writer describes going on in their mind's eye and following that along--so that what is shallow, flimsy, cartoonish would jar? And how many of those whose reading the words really was reading the words made their own judgments and spoke them rather than going along with the received opinion of "the critics" in the manner that Midcult-eating middlebrows so readily do? (Consider how when reading an unknown author with no one to claque for them and seeing an apparent flaw in their work they do not hesitate to pass judgment--often hastily and harshly--but when seeing exactly the same sort of failing in the work of a Name they give them the benefit of the doubt, make excuses and, if all else fails, take what they did "ironically," because, they tell themselves, surely a Great Writer would only do such a thing "ironically.")

I suspect there was a lot of this happening--to Mr. Wolfe's advantage, with everyone from those professional critics who did not have to be induced to claque but simply followed their prejudices and the herd, to the credulous cocktail partygoers, such that they failed to see that the book was not the masterpiece everyone was led to expect. But the failings of the story were the more obvious when De Palma and company dramatized the material on the big screen so that rather than having to read a 659-page book and picture it in their mind's eye someone else did it for them. At the time Wolfe's cheering section was so loud that few drew the obvious conclusion that the film merely revealed the book's weaknesses, and simply blamed the makers of the film for what had really been there all along--and the opinion for the most part stood ever since because so few have bothered with the film since.